Recently in Unintended Consequences Category

One of the most difficult concepts that many people have problems understanding is that of diminishing returns. This applies to many different areas in our lives and in our society. I don't know whether it's a lack of education, a failure in their upbringing, or something inherently lacking in the people themselves. Perhaps it's a little of all three.

Going hand in hand with this concept is one that has many of the same roots - perceived risk - something that has driven some folks into action to get the government to "Do Something!" about something that is a minor issue at best.

In case you're wondering, however briefly, how this particular subject came up, it was during a discussion at work about this post from FuturePundit dealing with the declining return on investment from electrical power efficiency.

My employer is always looking for ways to reduce our energy usage, something that appeals to the frugal Yankee in me. Over the past five or six years a number of measures have been taken to reduce our electrical usage, including the use of more efficient lighting at all levels, timers on our existing electric water heaters to shut them off when no one is in the building, on-demand water heaters replacing the older tank-type water heaters as they wear out, more energy efficient refrigerators (used for both food and for storage of certain manufacturing substances...though not in the same refrigerator!), and motion sensors to shut off lights in rooms when no one is in them, just to name a few of the improvements undertaken. All of this has helped reduce our electricity usage by over 20% as compared to 6 years ago. Will further investment reduce our electrical usage any more than it has? Sure it will, but (and it's a big 'but') we won't see anywhere near the savings we already have unless we spend a lot more money than has already been spent. We have reached the point of diminishing return. We'd need to spend many times more than we already have in order to achieve a small fraction of the savings already made. From a financial point of view the return on investment makes no sense, meaning further investment in this effort will not result in energy savings equal to what was spent to achieve them. Or put more simply, we'll spend more than we'll save. It's not worth it.

OK, back to the subject at hand.

We've seen more than a few times where some project has reached its original goals, whether it's a cleanup of some Superfund site or the closing of a municipal landfill. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the contaminants were cleaned up or the landfill might leak 0.001% of the liquids or decomposition products from the landfill. But for some folks that isn't good enough. They want 100%. Never mind that achieving that last little bit will cost as much, if not more, than what has already spent. Never mind that it will likely be the taxpayers footing the bill. Never mind that in the end it won't make one bit of difference. The project has blown past the point of diminishing returns and spending any additional money won't help...other than to make the folks bitching about it feel better. (It would be cheaper to give them some mood-elevating drugs to do that than wasting taxpayer dollars to 'fix' the last little iota of the problem.)

We see this lack of understanding about diminishing returns in all kinds of places and situations. It is also where the problem with perceived risk comes into play.

One of the biggest disservices ever perpetrated upon the public is the notion that life should be totally risk free. This meme started some time in the 1960's. (Yes, I know drives to improve safety started long before that, but the 100% risk free crap started in the late 60's/early 70's.) There's nothing wrong with reducing risk. But to think life can be made 100% risk free is ludicrous. It can't be done. But that doesn't stop people from trying to do so anyways. I wouldn't mind that so much if those same people understood the difference between real risk and perceived risk. The problem is that they don't and because of that lack of understanding money is wasted on slight risks while major risks are ignored.

An example:

Which entails more risk to life and limb: Driving a car or flying on a commercial airliner?

The answer is, of course, driving a car. (There were over 32,885 traffic fatalities in 2010, with many times that number of injuries. As an aside, that number is the lowest number of fatalities since 1949 despite more miles being traveled then ever before, giving us the lowest fatality rate ever.) But people perceive flying as more dangerous. Yet how many fatalities have there been in the US due to commercial airliner crashes over the past few years? None. A person is far more like to be injured or killed driving to or from the airport than they are by flying on a commercial airliner, but they're more afraid of dying in a plane crash. It's all perception, not reality.

Let's try another:

One person lives near a nuclear power plant. Another lives near a coal-fired power plant. Which one is at a higher risk of cancer, injury, or death?

The answer is the person living near the coal-fired plant. The effluvia from the smokestack and any runoff from the ash pile are a far greater hazard than anything coming from the nuclear plant under normal circumstances. Yet people perceive the nuclear power plant will cause them to get cancer and other illnesses. Even after the Three Mile Island accident there were no increases in cancer or other radiation related illnesses. (Some initial studies stated there were, but review of those studies by the CDC found some creative editing of the health statistics to 'prove' the case. Once all the raw data was reanalyzed those alleged increases in cancer cases disappeared.)

Over the years it seems to me the the perceived risks have received far more attention (and money) than actual risks. Efforts will be made to reduce risks that have little actual impact, but large risks will be ignored.

For instance, the NHTSA wants to ban the use of cell phones and other electronic devices by drivers of cars and trucks. All kinds of efforts are being made to codify that ban in to law across the nation despite the fact that the actual percentage of accidents caused by these distracting gizmos is unknown. The perception is that these devices are leaving a swath of death and destruction along the highways and byways of the nation to rival those caused by drunk driving. The NHTSA reports that 3092 traffic deaths were caused by distracted driving in 2010. That's one out of every eleven fatalities. How many of those were due to cell phone use or texting? The NHTSA doesn't actually say, though the article linked implies all of them were (but there was no actual number cited). The implication is that this is a major risk and that the government must "Do Something!' even though the actual risk is quite small.

But will the government spend a dime on something like removing homes from flood plains or barrier islands, obviating the need to constantly pay out to rebuild them again and again after they are destroyed? (Disclaimer: The gubmint did do that after the Mississippi River floods in 1993, relocating a number of towns to higher ground because it was cheaper to do so rather than paying out the flood insurance claims again and again and again and again, ad infinitum.)

Or will money be spent on things like crumbling roads and bridges, things that endanger us all? We must remember incidents like the Mianus River Bridge collapse on I-95 in Connecticut, the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, or the Nimitz Freeway collapse during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 , all of which killed and injured motorists. (The Nimitz Freeway collapse occurred because necessary upgrades to the highway support pylons were postponed.) How many other others are out there waiting to happen because we haven't spent the necessary funds to reduce a very real risk? Maybe this is due to the opposite of perceived risk, where people see no risk and therefore think nothing needs to be done, yet the risk exists and is higher than many of the perceived risks people waste time and money dealing with. How much did these real incidents cost compared to what it would have cost to fix the problems in the first place? Do I really need to answer that?

The people need to learn how to discriminate between real risk and perceived risk, and to understand the relationship to diminishing returns. Otherwise we will continue to ignore real risks and waste ever more money on things that are minimal risks at best.

Over at Ace of Spades is a list of the things the Left fears should Obama lose the election come next November. Are their fears unfounded? In some areas, yes. But for the most part they are right to fear that much of the damage done by the Congressional Democrats since 2007 and President Obama since 2009 will be undone should Obama lose in November. When you come right down to it, the upcoming elections are about the wholesale damage perpetrated by the Left's minions over the past 6 years. Will the American people allow the ongoing dismantling of a great nation all in the name of some vague sense of "fairness"? And just who defines what is fair? (Of course the Left believe they are the only arbiters of fairness, even though many I have debated with really have no idea what 'fair' really is.)

The problem is that many on the Left don't see the actions that have damaged the economy as bad. They only see it as 'fair'. (I'm still waiting for someone on the Left to show me where it says life is supposed to be fair. So far, they haven't, nor do I expect them to.) Through observation over the years I have come to see that the Left's ideology is both economically and morally bankrupt. Never mind history's lesson showing it to also to be a murderous ideology, in the end.

There are plenty of examples of the fairness of socialism going back over 400 years to show just how bad their ideology can make it. One of their first forays into 'fairness': the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts.

During the initial years of the colony, the Pilgrims tried a social experiment, one that predated Marx by almost 300 years, that experiment being "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need." The results? Famine. Everyone wanted from the common larder, but no one wanted to work to fill it. In the end the colonists abandoned the experiment as a failure and from that point on the colony thrived.

Did the Left learn from that experiment? No, of course not. They've tried that experiment again and again (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, etc.) with the results being the same: economic and social collapse, and in some cases, mass murder. Such failures haven't dissuaded them from trying to pull that here. I have little doubt their reasoning is something along the lines of "But we'll do it better this time because we're better than the others were!" They've become a living example of Einstein's axiom about insanity.

So now we come back to present day and the Left's push to drive America in a direction of oft proven failure. Again we return to the so-called fairness doctrine as an excuse to justify large scale theft and interference in our day to day lives. Where does this call for fairness derive?

I figure it goes back to the egalitarian movements that drove things like the French Revolution. An egalitarian society sounds like a great thing, in theory. But in practice, such societies tend to be anything but, usually devolving to the lowest common denominator - mob rule. The French Republic after the Revolution didn't earn the sobriquet "Reign of Terror" for nothing. Of those that did not devolve into mob rule, it was a totalitarian government that drove everyone to be equal - equally poor, equally miserable, and equally terrified of their government. I doubt that was the dream of the egalitarians, but that's what their dream ended up being - a nightmare.

The problem with such egalitarian ideals comes down to this: they are based upon two concepts that are poor at best and base at worst, those being human emotion and a false understanding of human nature. Let's take a look at both of these to see where the Left got it wrong and continues to do so.

The first of these two, emotion, is the most troublesome. While a sense of fairness may be an admirable thing and something to which we can aspire, it should not be something based upon envy or greed. Unfortunately the Left's sense of fairness is derived from that very source. All you have to do is listen to their rhetoric in regards to fairness and I think you'll find it has nothing to with actual fairness and everything to do with envy. Oh, they won't admit to it, but when you think about it it makes sense. It all comes down to "Hey, that guy/girl/person has something I don't and can't afford right now! That's not fair! We/I should take it away from them because they don't deserve it!" But if they earned the money to pay for it then why shouldn't they be allowed to have whatever it is? Again, envy comes into play, this time in regards to the money earned to pay for whatever it is. Why should one person make more for their job than someone else for their job? Never mind that one job may be worth far more than another, may create more goods, services, or jobs than another. It just doesn't seem fair. But it is. Too bad far too many of the Left are incapable of seeing this.

The second of the concepts that lead the Left astray is their decision to ignore human nature. Or perhaps I should say their decision to ignore it as it happens to be rather than as they wish it to be. Of the two, the second is based upon pure fantasy. It seems one of the biggest fantasies that endure on the Left is that you can change human nature with enough education, indoctrination, or terror. It's been tried in a number of places, but has never yielded the expected results. The USSR tried for over 5 generations to create the New Soviet Man, a human with none of the ideological weaknesses attributed to capitalists. They wanted someone that would put the needs of The State (or The Good Of The People) ahead of those of their own, ahead of those of their own families. But that way lies slavery, where the individual is merely a replaceable cog in the machinery of state, without free will, to be sacrificed at whim and without a thought to their own welfare. But that goes against millions of years of existence, against millions of years of human nature. You can't overturn something so basic to human existence with education, indoctrination, or terror. Human nature wins out in the end. And in the end that's why Leftist 'paradises' have collapsed and disappeared into history. We're watching that happen now in Venezuela, a once prosperous nation turned into a land of want, broken down infrastructure, and the inability to even feed itself, all done in the name of 'fairness'. And this is what the Left wants to do here?

Thanks, but no thanks.

As Cap'n Teach reminds us, no good deed goes unpunished. And so it is in regards to one of the biggest unintended consequences of more high fuel efficiency vehicles hitting the roads: dropping revenues from fuel taxes.

Another thing driving decreasing fuel consumption and fuel tax revenues is high fuel prices. This one-two punch has left both the federal and state governments scrambling to raise funds needed for road maintenance and construction.

So what is government to do about the revenue shortfall? Believe it or not, a per-mile tax is in the offing. No one has explained much about how it's going to work other than it will likely use GPS technology to track the miles driven by each vehicle.

Basically I have no problem with such a thing as long as the system only keeps track of the miles driven and not the routes taken or locations visited (the technology is easily modified to allow miles-only readouts). It smacks too much of Big Brother keeping track of where we go and when, something most of us feel uncomfortable about. There are already constitutionality questions about law enforcement using GPS trackers on suspects without warrants. This goes an order of magnitude beyond that.

Some don't like the idea at all, seeing as it means they'll be billed directly and in the open for their use of roads rather than the hidden fees they pay at the gas pump. Again I have no problem with this as long as the per-mile taxes lead to abolition of fuel taxes as they are applied now. Otherwise, no deal.

It is said the truly smart will learn from the harsh lessons of others' failures. I can say that one member of the WP clan is that smart, that being the youngest of the WP sisters. (As she says, she made her own mistakes while growing up that our parents never found out about.)

It would be great if the political class presently ruling the US was as smart as my youngest sister. Unfortunately they are not.

They see the economic meltdown occurring in the Euro-zone, yet refuse to learn the lessons countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are teaching us, the primary one being that eventually you will run out of other people's money to fund all the wonderful social programs that have been used to bribe the electorate.

Italy is the latest to teeter on the brink of insolvency, and should it go over the edge it is quite likely it will pull the rest of the Euro-zone with it. Greece's default damaged the European economy yet it has only a fraction of the GDP of Italy. Should Italy default Europe will take an additional $2 trillion hit it cannot afford. Is it any wonder Germany is considering abandoning the Euro and going back to the mark? Can anyone deny that this problem has been driving the British public to demand a referendum about whether or not to remain in the EU? At least those two countries see the problem and realize they'll have to bankrupt themselves in a doomed effort to prop up economic policies from Brussels.

But too many of our own politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of party, seem oblivious to the fact that unless we make some drastic changes in how our federal government taxes and spends we will be headed down the same path. Labor leaders ignore the fact that neither businesses or taxpayers are a bottomless source of funds, shortchanging their own members by making promises no one can keep.

Should the US fail to put its financial/economic house in order, and right quick, it will pull the world economy down with it into a depression unlike any we've seen before.

The Jawa Report has a handy dandy checklist comparing the Tea Party folks to the #Occupy folks. Again, it's no surprise the OWS folks come out on the short end of this one.

There are also a couple of related links at the bottom of the list you should check out.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Is it possible the Occupy Wall Street protests might succeed where indoctrination has failed?

While the OWS protests are obstensively supposed to show "the people" the evils of capitalism, it is having an unexpected side effect. It's teaching the OWS protesters the evils of socialism up close and personal, by way of Ayn Rand.

Not surprisingly, Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for thieves and con-men. As one organizer complains, "Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment."

Then there are the bums. Originally, from what I can tell, street people were actively recruited by the Occupiers as a way of adding to their somewhat anemic numbers. But the naïve young hippies who make up the bulk of the movement are quickly discovering what the rest of us, with the benefit of actual life experience, already know about "the homeless."

Over at Occupy Boston, a protester complains, "It's turning into us against them. They come in here and they're looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don't bring anything to the table at all." Another report concludes with a similar sentiment.

"We have compassion toward everyone. However, we have certain rules and guidelines," said Lauren Digioia, 26, a member of the sanitation committee. "If you're going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled."

These kids had better watch out. If they start thinking that like this, pretty soon they might find themselves at a Tea Party rally.

"There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled." Gee, that sounds familiar. Could it be because the very ones complaining about the takers are themselves takers of a higher order? What hypocrites. They're finding out that the socialist/marxist creed of "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need," does nothing but create a large amount of 'needy' while diminishing the number filling the needs. It's right out of Atlas Shrugged, where the takers (looters) take more and more while creating a huge disincentive for those producing what is taken to keep working. At some point the producers end up becoming nothing more than slaves to the takers, as Rand outlined in her novel.

It seems the OWS protesters are "dominated by 20-year-old white middle-class college boys ." What the hell do these college boys know of real life and how economies actually work? From what they're showing the world, not much. But they're sure as heck learning the hard way that nothing free is actually free. Someone else has to pay for it. This time around, it's them.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Welcome to another edition of Tech Tuesday, though in this instance we're not dealing with high tech so much as retro tech.

How many of you out there remember the Easy-Bake Oven? It's been around for decades - since 1963 (I remember when one of my sisters got one. It was the coolest thing because you could make cakes and brownies with it!) It was a simple piece of technology - a plastic outer case that looked like a miniature version of a kitchen stove, an inner case made out of some kind of sheet metal, a 100 watt incandescent light bulb, and an electrical cord. That's all there was to it.

It came with small packages of Betty Crocker cake and brownie mix, no different from the larger boxes our mothers bought to make their cakes and brownies. It helped that you could use mix from the larger boxes to make the small baked goods. (No, I am not being sexist. You have to remember that many of us grew up in the 50's and 60's before gender roles were redefined. But as a side note, the WP Mom was never a traditional homemaker. My folks were well ahead of their time as the 'traditional' roles didn't really apply in our family.)

So what makes me bring up this bit of retro tech?

It's being redesigned.

Because the gubmint, in its self-delusional wisdom, decided to ban incandescent light bulbs starting with the 100 watt bulbs, the Easy-Bake Oven could have gone the way of the eight track tape.

Hasbro has redesigned it to do away with the need for the soon-to-be-defunct 100 watt bulb, replacing it with a more traditional heating element. The Easy-Bake Oven also gets a new, 'swoopier' look in it's eleventh revision of the classic toy. Unfortunately the redesign also includes a much higher price: $49.99 versus the last model's $29.99, a 66% increase.

I'll bet the geniuses in Washington never realized the negative effect their light bulb ban was going to have on the next generation of bakers. Call it yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Listening to the plans President Obama has made to address the jobs problem, it is no surprise to anyone that he really doesn't have a plan, or at least not a new one.

If his $878 billion stimulus program had been used to actually address a number of problems within the country, those primarily being our crumbling infrastructure, rather than using it for political patronage, we might not have as much of an economic problem as we presently face. But far too many of us knew very little of that money would be used to stimulate anything but the growth of the federal government.

Will Obama's September 8^th speech try to make a case for spending even more money we don't have to pay for more political patronage? If history is any indication, then the answer is likely yes.

What the president really needs to do (but won't) is to rein in his renegade agency heads (NLRB or EPA, anyone?) who are making sure it's damn difficult for anyone to create jobs...except for government jobs.

What the president needs to do is to get the government out of the way of free enterprise to let it do what it does best - create jobs.

What the president needs to do is fire all his czars and advisers because, quite frankly, they have no idea what they're doing. Most of them are academics with little, if any, real world experience doing things like running businesses or meeting payrolls or dealing with an ever increasing avalanche of government regulations and paperwork that does nothing but cost time and money to deal with yet add little of benefit to anyone except bureaucrats.

What the president needs to do is realize that one of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, was right when he said to America "Government isn't the solution. Government is the problem."

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American peoples' lives. After all, everyone in government is having a hard enough time running their own lives, let alone those of 300,000,000 other people in this country. Every government that has tried to do so has ultimately failed, resulting in widespread misery. Quite often those governments end with fatal results for members of those governments.

What the president needs to understand that no one in government, and I mean no one, is either smart enough or wise enough to run the American economy. History is littered with plenty of examples to show this is true. Unfortunately the president and many in Congress have ignored this truth, figuring that this time they'll get it right. (They won't.)

All I expect from the president during his speech is more of the same old crap he's taken from the FDR, LBJ, and Karl Marx playbooks, just put in new wrappings and hyped by the Lame Stream Media.

In other words, "There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along!"

I had an enjoyable discussion with one of my fellow employees this afternoon. It dealt with working, the differences between small and large companies, the advantages and disadvantages of both, and the recent dearth of qualified candidates for a number open positions within our company.

Without going into a lot of detail to protect the identity of my co-worker (and my job), let's just say we've been running into a couple of problems in regards to some candidates, the two biggest being that too many of them are well credentialed but not necessarily well educated, and lack of experience in the areas we really need. Apparently this is not a problem unique to our company.

While there are plenty of jobs open begging for people to fill them, there aren't enough people applying for them because they feel the jobs are beneath them ("I didn't spend all that money for a degree in Transgendered Native American Studies just to take a job working in a factory!"), or those applying for them have neither the experience or the capability of doing the job.

I caught a piece on Fox News this evening covering this particular issue. (No, I'm not going to link to it because I don't feel the need to do so.) A number of the companies they talked to said pretty much the same thing my co-worker and I had during our discussion. One manufacturer said they'll hire someone qualified even if they don't need them at the time because someone like that has been hard to come by.

As the WP Dad said about that report, "Is this because our incompetent education system hasn't been teaching our children what they need to know to make it in the world? What good is all that self-esteem they've been ramming down their throats the past 20 years if they can't get a job because they have neither the knowledge or ability to do it?"

Indeed.

What is it about President Obama that he cannot stop campaigning? You would think that once he won the election in 2008 that he would be able to switch from campaign mode to governing mode, but no, it appears he was never able to make that transition.

Maybe it's because all he's done since he ran for office in Illinois is campaign, starting at the state level and working his way all the to the White House. He's been in the office of the highest elected official in the country, the pinnacle of any political career, and he can't stop campaigning.

From the day of his inauguration all his speeches have sounded more like stump speeches rather than Presidential speeches.

The very first speech he gave as President - his inaugural speech - sounded like a campaign speech, slamming his predecessor for 'everything that had gone wrong'. Never mind that no newly inaugurated president has ever done that before, particularly when his predecessor was standing nearby.

His State of the Union addresses have been anything but, being more about him and what he was going to do rather than being about he state of our nation. (His first SOTU speech used the word "I" 96 times and "me" 8 times. George Bush's last SOTU speech used "I" 39 times and "me" 2 times.) It was yet another campaign speech, meaningless noise quickly forgotten.

Now he's out on the stump again, this time in a $1 million+ tour bus (built in Canada), telling us yet again what he's going to to. Not that he's telling anyone how he'll do what he's promised (he never does), but he'll place the blame on the GOP for his failures, past, present, and future. It's interesting that he blames the GOP for his failures in 2009 ans 2010 even though for both of those years he had a solid Democrat majority in both the House and the Senate. His failures are his and his alone because he's incapable of leading.

He has not shown one iota of leadership, leaving all the heavy lifting to Congress, his czars, and his advisers. He has not presented an acceptable budget since he took office. He let Nancy and Harry put together that odious piece of legislation known derisively as ObamaCare and signed the bill even though it would do nothing more than destroy one of the greatest health care systems in the world, all in the name of "fairness". (One has to wonder what the word actually means to Obama, because I doubt it means the same thing to him and his progressive cronies as it does to the other 300 million+ Americans.)

And so the Neverending Campaign continues.

I guess we can call this yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something the Left seems to be very good at overlooking.

We've been reading about the effects of California's so-called "Amazon Tax", which was supposed to force Amazon to collect California sales tax for all sales made to customers in the state because of its presence by way of its affiliates program. The Golden State expected to collect millions in extra revenues, but no surprise to those of us well versed in unintended consequences, they've collected very little.

Why?

Because Amazon shut down its affiliates program in California, denying the state any extra sales tax revenues. But there's a secondary effect the legislators didn't foresee that will further decrease tax revenues: loss of income taxes from the affiliates.

Since the now former affiliates are no longer paid a commission from sales made through their links, they no longer generate the income taxes that would have been paid into the state coffers in Sacramento.

Talk about a twofer: no sales tax revenues and even less income tax revenues.

Maybe the pols in Sacramento were expecting Amazon to go to court to block implementation, but leave its affiliates program intact. Instead, Amazon said "Enough!" and pulled the plug, leaving California even worse off than they were before this idiot tax.

But wait! There's more!

Now California wants to pass a "fitted sheet" law that would make it illegal for hotels to not use fitted sheets on their beds. How effin' dumb is that?

It's no wonder California is doomed. All the really smart people have already left, taking their money and their businesses with them.

A follow on to yesterday's cartoon rant about the riots in England is this video rant by one of my favorite Brits, Pat Condell. For those of you who have never seen any of his video pieces I must warn you that he does not pull any punches and calls it exactly like he sees it.

I think this cartoon illustrates the thinking of those rioting in the UK all too well.


For more head to Spider and Scorpion.

Over the past year and a half I've listened to a large number of people disparaging the Tea party movement. Most of them have been card-carrying Democrats (or at least those with the belief they know how to spend my money better than I do). Others have been RINOs or part of the so-called "Establishment" Republicans.

The Tea party has been excoriated in the press, with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other media organs of the Left leading the way. Washington politicians and other Beltway insiders have derided the Tea party as "hobbits", "terrorists", "Nazis", "racists", "jack-booted thugs", and a whole host of other derogatory labels.

As the volume of hateful rhetoric aimed at the Tea party and its supporters has increased, it has made me and others realize that the groups making these accusations must be really getting nervous. As one commenter to this piece wrote, "If you're getting a lot of [flak], you must be over the target." And so it must be as the Tea party gains supporters throughout the country at a local, state, and national level because they're tired of being ignored by the Coastal elite and the Beltway intellectuals.

My most memorable run in with an unabashed Tea party hater took place at our business when one of our customers went on a rant about "those goddamn Tea partiers wanting to take everything away from us!" There was no way I could not respond, so I asked her where she'd gotten that idea. Apparently she'd read it in the paper, in this case the Boston Globe. (One must remember, the Globe is owned by the NYT and has the same editorial policies as its parent corporation.) I calmly informed her that if her opinion was based solely on what she'd read in the Globe, then she'd been misinformed and lied to. She saw the Tea party as a bunch of religious fundamentalists bent on depriving the poor, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, and undoing decades of civil rights advances. I had to remind her that many of the civil rights advances came from the GOP, not her sainted Democrats. I reminded her the KKK were primarily Southern Democrats, not Republicans. I reminded her it was the Democrats who started us down this path of unsustainable spending going all the way back to FDR. I reminded her that it was LBJ who decided his Great Society was the answer to all of our society's problems, that it had failed miserably, and that it was funded by stealing from the Social Security trust fund.. I reminder her it was the Democrat majorities in Congress going back to 2007 that multiplied the annual deficits to many times that of all of Dubya's deficits combined.

I gave her the URL for the Contract From America website which explains the Tea party platform, none of which deals with social issues she claims the Tea party is involved with. She wasn't interested. Instead she chose willful ignorance and adherence to libelous propaganda from those who do not have her best interests at heart.

Maybe she will care when the country is unable to pay its bills and all of the government support she is 'owed' ends because there's no money left to pay for it all. Maybe she will care when all "the rich" she's constantly complaining about are either driven into bankruptcy or flee with their wealth to friendly climes and no one is left to pay for everything she is owed.

But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE:It appears Senator John Kerry has decided to add fuel to the fire by expressing his opinion that the media should not give equal time to those "absolutely absurd notions" voiced by the Tea Party because their opinions "are not factual."

What a putz.

It's no secret I'm a fan of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In both I've seen far too many parallels to what's been happening in our country, particularly since 2007.

The seeds for our self-destruction were laid a long time ago and now, in some places, are bearing fruit. All one needs to do is look at the state of Illinois and the city of Detroit. Both illustrate exactly what Rand wrote about over 50 years ago.

As Dan Mitchell explains, plans for a number of Detroit neighborhoods outlined in a CNBC report sounded familiar.

But there was also something about this story that rang a bell. It took a few minutes, since I'm getting old and decrepit, but then I realized that "blighted areas" was an eerily familiar term. Didn't Ayn Rand use that term in one of her books?

Indeed, she did. Thanks to the miracle of Google Books, here is one of several passages in Atlas Shrugged that references Detroit--oops, I mean "blighted areas":

No railroad was mentioned by name in the speeches that preceded the voting. The speeches dealt only with the public welfare. It was said that while the public welfare was threatened by shortages of transportation, railroads were destroying each other through vicious competition, on "the brutal policy of dog-eat-dog." While there existed blighted areas where rail service had been discontinued, there existed at the same time large regions where two or more railroads were competing for a traffic barely sufficient for one. It was said that there were great opportunities for younger railroads in the blighted areas. While it was true that such areas offered little economic incentive at present, a public-spirited railroad, it was said, would undertake to provide transportation for the struggling inhabitants, since the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.

Fifty years ago, the book was viewed as a dystopian fantasy. Today, Greece, Illinois, and Detroit are making Ayn Rand seem like a prophet.

When I reread Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Everything Rand had created in her novel was happening at that moment. (I have to admit I had little appreciation for the book when I read it the first time over 35 years ago. I guess history gives one a little more perspective.) Many of our present day "betters" are characters right out of the novel. What makes matters worse is that their ignorance of how the economy works is not so much a lack of exposure to it so much as willful ignorance on their part. They don't want to know how things work in the real world because they know better how to remake things into their version of utopia. Too bad they're wrong because their version of utopia is hell on earth for everyone else.

As mentioned earlier, all we have to do is look to Detroit to see how well that's all worked out. There are plenty of other examples of this just in the US alone, like Newark and Jersey City in New Jersey, and Gary, Indiana. If you need larger examples then states like Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and California should suffice. All are suffering under decades of enlightened rule by our betters (though New Jersey has a glimmer of hope in the form of Governor Chris Christie). If that isn't enough for you then look to Greece and Portugal to see how things have worked out there.

We see example after example after example of how our supposed "betters" are no such thing, being no better than what Rand called "looters" in Atlas Shrugged, for that's what they are.

You know it's getting bad when a rogue federal agency is being used as a bludgeon to punish critics of the present administration. (Of course the critics aren't so much saying anything about the Obama Administration so much as showing them to be the know-nothing socialist chumps they are.)

In this case the EPA is doing its darnedest to cripple the Texas economy by using environmental rules never meant to apply to the situation in Texas. By trying to force Texas to abide by the EPA's Cross State rules regarding coal-fired power plants and setting a very short deadline by which Texas must comply, Texas will lose a considerable amount of its electrical generation capacity.

But somehow I doubt Texas is going to cave in to the socialist yokels running the EPA and will call their bluff, in effect telling them in true Texas fashion to "Come And Take It", or as the PJ Tatler writes it, "Kiss my ass!"

Such an action by the EPA can have nothing but negative consequences, particularly for the Obama Administration and for the power of the ever expanding government bureaucracies. As Obama and his czars try to clamp down on the economy and drive even more businesses to the brink, the backlash is likely to sink any chance the President has for re-election.

Let's hope this is the case as we can no longer afford the destructive forces of this know-nothing administration.

It's gotten to the point where President Obama resembles one of those romantic swains who does not understand that "no" means "no", or in this case "Hell no!"

We have an economy that is still foundering due to job-killing regulations made by rogue bureaucracies, job-killing legislation by Congress, bailouts to commercial and financial institutions that don't deserve them, and a government spending spree that looks more like a teenager running around using daddy's credit card. But the 'teenager' doesn't understand that the credit card has reached its limit. What's worse is that he wants the credit card issuer (i.e. the taxpayers) to pony up even more credit to keep spending money he doesn't have and can never pay back. When he doesn't get his way he throws a tantrum, blaming the over-the-limit credit card he used on those no longer willing to have their pockets picked by an ungrateful and willful child.

Try as he might, I don't think Obama's going to get away with painting the GOP as the cause of the upcoming default on August 2^nd. The Republicans are standing their ground, not willing to give the President a pass by reneging on their campaign promises and raising the debt limit in return for 'future' spending cuts. All one needs to do is look how such promises made by Democrats in the past all fell by the wayside once they got their way to see how foolish trusting them again would be.

On top of that, the President wants to impose an additional $1 trillion in taxes on top of those he's already added to pay for it all. (We all know that theoretical extra revenue will not be used to pay down the debt, but will instead be spent on stupid and foolish things we don't need, want, or can afford.) That's all we need is to have yet another $1 trillion in capital removed from the economy, money that otherwise would be used to expand businesses, create jobs, and expand the tax base. Neither the President or Congressional Democrats see that every action they have taken over the past 4 years has narrowed the tax base, increased uncertainties in the business world which in turn has discouraged investment and hiring, and stretched out a painful recession and the resulting high unemployment/underemployment an additional 2 years with who knows how many more to follow.

What part of "Enough! Not one red cent more!" does the President fail to understand?

All of it, apparently.

Is it just me or is the state of California doing everything it can to ensure its total financial collapse will take place? Nope, it isn't me.

It seems every measure the California legislature is taking will have the effect of increasing support of the state employees unions pay, benefits, and pensions while increasing the burden on the taxpayers, or decreasing its already falling tax revenues, or both.

The latest stupid, rent-seeking action? Shutting down Amazon's Associate program in California by trying to force Amazon to collect California sales taxes (even though the move is illegal). The amount of sales taxes collected by this move? Zero The estimated amount of income tax revenues lost with the shutdown of the Amazon program? $151 million.

As Bill Quick, a now former Amazon Associate, writes:

Did I mention that these people are leftists, greedheads, and wreckers? Let me add that they are also corrupt bribe-takers on a massive scale. They pushed this law through, and are more than happy to see the Amazon Associates program permanently shut down, because that is the goal the real backers of this law were after in the first place. It has nothing to do with sales tax collections. It is, in its entirety, designed to use the government as a club to shut down Amazon's Associate Program in the biggest states in the country.

How so?

Big companies like Wal-Mart, (an out of state corporations itself) who have associate programs that are much less effective at driving sales than the Amazon Associate program is, can't handle that competition head on by beefing up their own programs. Or at least they don't want to. So what these sponsors were really after was not to collect additional sales tax for California, but to shut down the competition in the state. They got what they wanted. The politicians behind this bill will get what they want - more money and support (bribes) from companies like Wal-Mart. And the state will get nothing, in fact, will lose money.

But of course the big drive now is to somehow make Amazon the villain in all this. And too many people are buying the propaganda. Sad.

So while the aim of the legislation appeared to be to collect sales taxes, it was really a rent-seeking move by Amazon's competition? This sounds a little paranoid. But unfortunately, it is likely true. There's certainly enough precedent for such a move, and we've seen it at the federal level, particularly since "The One" Term Wonder took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Should this type of shenanigans continue in the Golden State, the motivation for businesses and residents to leave California will rise and the stream of businesses and workers already leaving will turn into a flood. That ought to help the state's bottom line. NOT.

Though the link to this piece appeared over at Instapundit a few days ago, I hadn't read it until yesterday. If nothing else it proves that Robert Heinlein was right when he wrote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

All we need to do is look at Pakistan to see how Heinlein's observation is true.

As Anglo-Indians were driven out of Pakistan, its society and economy started to deteriorate. Those actually producing the wealth, running the bureaucracies, the courts, the hospitals, the police, the railroads, the schools were driven out and bad things started happening. As Masood Hasan writes in the Pakistan's international edition of The News:

It is hard to believe that Pakistan was once a gentle country. It is even harder to believe that some of the most wonderful people lived here. All that seems like a misty memory which has little relevance as you face the day's first rude slaps. A friend passed me an interesting short article about the Anglo-Indians who lived and worked in what is now India and Pakistan. The Anglos are long gone swallowed up by the mists of time, driven out from here to fend for themselves. But in their extinction lies a bigger tragedy.

The Anglo Indians were fun people. But more than the singular expertise they brought to the jobs that became traditionally their forte, they added a swing, vibrancy and a sheer joy of living spirit to our society that in many ways epitomised the new, fresh spirit that was Pakistan. That was then. Now it's a fading sepia tone picture. Those of us who grew up with them, watched with considerable sadness as family after family left this country to go and live in alien climes. There was nothing left for them. They were wise in retrospect. Look at our bestiality towards our minorities. But while the Anglo Indians were here, they gave us a unique gift. The joy of living and of being alive.

Pakistan is a shadow if its former self. Where once everyone could walk the streets safely, one now puts one's life in jeopardy, particularly if you aren't Pakistani. The government is corrupt, the military is rife with religious fundamentalists who see Wahabbi-perverted jihad as a good thing, and it's once thriving economy and society is a shambles.

The 1972 laws enforced by ZAB to please the fundos broke the spirit of all of us, particularly the Anglo Indians. Bars, discos, clubs all shut down in fear. Suddenly hosts of musicians and other artists had no livelihood. 'Tolerance went up in smoke,' recalls one sad person. Came 1979 and the evil Zia and the coup de grace forced the Anglos to escape, migrate anywhere they could go. They left by the droves, never to come back. The clubs died, the dance floors uprooted, the many services they offered fell by the wayside. In driving out this small community, we dug our own graves. We rapidly became soulless, grey, hypocritical and boring. With them gone, an integral part of decent civilian life was snuffed out. Guns replaced guitars. The scorched landscape that we inherited, now mocks us. Laughter has changed to anguish. Pakistan may be a 'hard country', but it is also a barren and desolate land. One gentleman of the fabled 60s sums it all up in one line: 'Those days are gone. They will not come back.' Quite an epitaph wouldn't you agree?

What's telling are the comments from those who remember the days before everything started coming apart and their lament at what their home country has become.

As I wrote in my previous post about Obama's Afghanistan speech, I don't believe he knows what he's doing. This is particularly true when it comes to economics. There's certainly been plenty of evidence that drives me to make this claim, but this one takes the cake: Obama believes technology leads to job losses. It's such an old saw that has been disproven again and again, but he's trying to sell it as the reason the American job market is in such dire straits.

"There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," he said. "You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

The president calls this a structural issue--we usually call it progress. And it isn't exactly a new phenomenon. It's been going on for centuries, and its pace has accelerated over the past 50 years. Businesses relentlessly look for ways to replace workers with machines. The machines get better and smarter. We go from spoons to shovels to excavators, not the other way around.

I get the feeling he'd like to see us go backwards, reducing productivity, increasing the costs of goods, and making even more American jobs disappear to other countries that haven't deluded themselves that technology costs jobs and that increased productivity is a bad thing.

I hate to say this, but what he put forward almost sounded like it came right out of Atlas Shrugged, with the government forcing producers to use less efficient production methods as a means to 'create' more jobs. Of course it won't work out that way and they'll end up with even fewer jobs as they price themselves right out of the market.

And so it goes with One-Term Wonder, a master of the Law of Unintended Consequences.